NEW YORK — Nearly all of today’s Native Americans in North, Central and South America can trace their ancestry to six women whose descendants immigrated around 20,000 years ago, a DNA study suggests.
Those women left a particular DNA legacy that persists to today in about 95 percent of Native Americans, researchers said.
The finding does not mean that only these six women gave rise to the migrants who crossed into North America from Asia in the initial populating of the continent, said study co-author Ugo Perego.
The women lived between 18,000 and 21,000 years ago, though not necessarily at exactly the same time, he said.
The work was published this week by the journal PLoS One.
The work confirms previous indications of the six maternal lineages, he said. But an expert unconnected with the study said the findings left some questions unanswered.
Perego and his colleagues traced the history of a particular kind of DNA, mitochondrial DNA, which is passed along only by the mother.
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